


wasn't there to beg you (baby don't go)

by bipolyjack



Series: Light It Up For Us [2]
Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Canon, cassmako if u squint, well. the chime was a polycule theory if u really squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:54:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24773461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bipolyjack/pseuds/bipolyjack
Summary: Mako is tired.Not like he would know what to do with himself if he could retire. What do you do? Sit around? Stare at walls, watch TV? Take walks in the park in Centralia, feed the squirrels?
Series: Light It Up For Us [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1310033
Kudos: 5





	wasn't there to beg you (baby don't go)

Aria's calling again.

Mako lets his comm ring through, one eye on the gently blipping call indicator and the other focused on the reports he’s been poring over for the past several hours, wow, it sure has been several hours without him realizing, hasn't it? Ever since the defeat of Rigour, Mako's found himself unable to rest for long. Or at all, if he's being honest with himself. Which he's not, because being honest with himself tends to lead to an anxiety spiral he never quite seems to have the time for.

Aria doesn't leave a voice message this time.

One part of him wishes, almost angrily, that she would be more insistent about dragging him out of his apartment, out of his never-ending work, out of his own head. But she’s tried, she’s been trying for years now. Almost a decade. And the one time he’d taken her up on one of her offers and gone to a restaurant with her, a hipstery sort of sushi place in one of the new skydomes, full of big glass windows and hanging plants in shiny little chrome planters, he’d left mid-meal, plagued by the nagging feeling that there was _something he needed to do_. He stopped answering Aria’s calls after that, and that's the other part of him. The part that still buzzes with the mindless low hum of Rigour, the part that, no matter how he tries, he finds himself physically unable to ignore. The part of him that isn't human anymore, isn't Stratus, isn't Mako, isn't anything but the relentless urge to _work_.

He does love Aria, obviously. Maybe not as much as Cass had, and they’d certainly become less and less close following the death of Paisley Moon. But he loves her enough that whenever he ignores a call from her - right now, for example - he feels the need to work harder and longer, to justify blowing her off.

Mako is tired.

That doesn't matter so much, on its own, as a concept. But he knows he looks tired. And Aria, being Aria, would notice.

He gets up, just for a second (“just for a second,” he bargains with himself), and wanders into the kitchenette for a snack, only to remember just how little he keeps in his fridge - a bottle of old mustard, a half-empty jar of pickles, an extremely well-aged third of a block of cheese. He ends up eating most of his meals on the go nowadays. Plus he doesn't like the sound the refrigerator makes, that deep, barely audible hum. Sets his teeth on edge.

Mako rests his forehead on the cool metal door of the refrigerator, just for a second (“just one second,” he tells himself). He closes his eyes, regrets it, opens them again. Maybe that’s why sleep has been escaping him lately, he thinks, rummaging in a cabinet for instant coffee packets, running water into his dented kettle. God, it isn't fair - he hadn’t even _seen_ what happened to Cass, but his dumb brain has no problem conjuring up visions of them slumped in the high-backed pilot’s chair of the Apokine, skin sheened with sweat by the light of the approaching sun. The spear, pinning Rigour to the earth. Rigour, staring up at them, seething. The heat, swallowing them both. The light.

Aria, somewhere, sobbing.

Weird to think about how he and Aria are the only ones left now. Of the Chime. Yeah, Jace and Addax and Jamil are around - Mako sees them once in a while, for work - and Orth, and Jacqui, but sometimes, at his loneliest, Mako only wants a very specific kind of company. And there's nobody left who can give it to him.

Ted is gone, too. And Tower. And Larry. And the Triglets.

In pouring the coffee, Mako somehow slops some of the scalding water on himself and hisses a curse, sucking his fingers as he heads back to his desk with the mug. The files are still up on his little bank of monitors, supplemented by his own notes, tags, and highlighting in the Mesh. He's tracking a freelance weapons dealer through a sloppy paper trail of suspiciously Rigour-like tech, and through them, a manufacturing company that purportedly requires long hours for low pay that no one ever seems to complain about.

People never fucking learn. Even all these years later.

The work will never be over, probably.

Not like he would know what to do with himself if he could retire. What do you do? Sit around? Stare at walls, watch TV? Take walks in the park in Centralia, feed the squirrels?

At least with this job, Mako doesn’t have to struggle to fill his time. And he knows from experience that the buzz at the back of his head, the tickle in his mind, will always make him fill his time.

**Author's Note:**

> Series and fic title from Son of Robot by Dance Gavin Dance


End file.
